Storage Nation

I was out of pocket last week supporting the EBC on the Road in Sweden. Kenneth Chang, who managers our Executive Briefing Centers in Sefton Park, UK and Santa Clara, California, recruits our executives to spend a week doing briefings for companies in locations outside of our EBCs so that we can get closer to our customers and prospects.  This has been helpful for many companies who have had to cut back on their travel expenses. Unlike other briefing centers that are staffed by dedicated presenters, our EBC briefings are done by product managers and executives who have direct responsibility for the products and solutions that they present

February 14 marks the start of the Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger. This year it happens to fall on Valantine’s Day.  Here is a greeting, wishing you all the best for this New Year From the Folks at Hitachi Data Systems

While Cloud computing is touted as a new way to mask the complexity of the IT infrastructure and provide IT services as “a pay as you grow” service, these concepts  were introduced over 10 years ago with the service providers of the late 1990’s. These concepts were so appealing that they helped to fuel the dot com boom,  but disappeared in the dot com crash of 2001/2002. What has changed to make us think that a shared services model like cloud computing and cloud storage will be successful this time around? Key to the success of cloud storage providers, as with the dot com storage services providers (SSP) of earlier days, will be the ability to leverage their resources and be more efficient in managing the growth of storage compared to their end users.

Happy NewYear and welcome to 2010! I wish you all a healthy and productive new year. While the economy seems to be getting better, budget planners are still very cautious and so we will continue to see a drive to consolidate to reduce cost and thin down the fat to be more agile. Therefore data center virtualization will be a top priority for 2010.  We have already seen the adoption of server virtualization platforms with more competitive offerings and faster more powerful processors and networks becoming mainstream. The next major step in data center consolidation will be in the consolidation of storage through thin provisioning.

I would like to wish you all the best for the holidays. I will be taking some time off and will be back after New Years day.  Thanks to all of you who read this blog and special thanks to those who take the time to add your comments. Even if you don’t agree with me, I value and respect your perspective and will publish your comments.    I look forward to 2010 and future dialogue with you around the storage issues and thoughts of the day.

If you saw the comments by EMC’s Barry Burke to my last blog post, Barry give his explanation of how VMAX works.

EMC announced FAST version 1 this week and one of the more insightful articles was by Beth Pariseau of SearchStorage.com. I am fairly certain EMC briefed Beth on this announcement and that she had access to their references, so it’s safe to say her information is pretty accurate here are my thoughts on what I read in the PR and from Beth’s article:   Is EMC behind the competition? – Hitachi has had policy based file and LUN level tiering for some time

This morning Hitachi Data Systems announced the addition of the Hitachi Data Replicator to our portfolio of replication and data protection software. This product is the result of a partnership with InMage Systems which was founded by our good friend Kumar Malavalli, founder and CTO for Brocade Communications and Rajeev Atluri from Gadoox

On my previous post, which was titled, I Agree With Chuck on Data Dedupe” I received a fair number of comments. Some were from Jered Floyd of Permabit and even one from Steve Duplessie . My post was intended to point out that while dedupe was an excellent tool for reducing storage bloat, it was addressing the symptom and not the cause which was stale data and over allocation at the source. Unfortunately this post was interpreted as supporting Chuck Hollis’ view on dedupe of primary data.

Chuck Hollis had an interesting observation on deduplication of primary data and I/O density . He points out that while deduplication is great for backup, archive, and large file repositories, it might not be as great for primary data. His reasoning is that dedupe can cause an increase in I/O density which may impact the performance of primary data and negate the value of space savings that dedupe could bring.